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REVISTA TIPOGRÁFICA
EDITORIAL
JOHN L . WALTERS
Several recent issues of Eye have focused on type design, but this special puts the emphasis back on typography – the art and craft of working with what Gerrit Noordzij once called prefabricated letters. Paul Shaw and Abby Goldstein are on a mission to help designers and typographers understand scripts – the fastest growing sector in the market. ‘First and foremost,’ they say, ‘script typography is musical.’ John Morgan’s practice covers everything from identity to public art to website design, but typography lies at its core, as shown by the books and journals he designs. For Morgan, type creates atmosphere.
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EDITORIAL
Massimo Vignelli’s typographic design is embed- ded in Modernist design history, yet often all we see are a few ‘iconic’ works at thumbnail size. Reputations gives us a chance to see his work at close quarters. Finally, ‘Last things last’ is a refreshingly candid coda to the famous ‘First things first’ manifesto (see Eye 13), accompanied by some impeccable design and typography by its author, Ken Garland. JLW
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INDEX
6 Family planning, or how type families work
14
31
Standard Deviations: Types and Families in Contemporary Design
Interview: Karel Martens – Graphic Designer
45 What is Typography?
101 Artigo à Escolha TAP 2059
115 Colophon / Ficha Técnica
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Family planning, or how type families work “An essay on the history and definition of type families, type design parameters, and the possibilities of creating larger type systems today.”
The size and complexity of recentlydeveloped type families has reached unprecedent levels. Look, for instance, at United, a recent release (2007) from House Industries. The family includes 105 fonts composed of three styles (sans, serif and italic), available in seven weights and five widths. It takes a couple of minutes just to scroll through all the variants listed in the font menu. For a further example of this trend, Hoefler & Frere-Jones have just released their Chronicle type family (2002-2007), the range of which extends through widths (from regular to compressed), weights (from extra light to black), and optical size (from text to headline). In terms of sheer size, Chronicle comprises 106 fonts and beats the rival United by a single stylistic variant. Of course these ‘superfamilies’ benefit from the inventions of the past centuries; an ongoing series of typographic innovations that broke new ground for generations of designers to come. PETER BILAK
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HISTORY AS A CONTINUOUS SERIES OF DISCOVERIES Ever since the earliest use of movable metal type; certain typefaces have included versions cut for specific point sizes. Claude Garamond’s type from the 1530s (also known as the caractères de l’Université), included 15 versions ranging in size from 6 to 36 points. Each size was drawn, cut and cast separately; characters were designed specifically for the optical appearance of the printed text, with optimised letter widths and contrasts between the thick and thin parts of the letterforms. When photographically scaled to the same size, it is easy to see significant differences between the different designed sizes. Earlier typographers would therefore choose various sizes, just as we might choose various weights of a particular typeface today. In the age of the enlightenment, there was a clear need to organise and rationalise these differing sizes of printing types. In 1737, Pierre Simon Fournier published a table of graded sizes of printing types, introducing the first-ever standardized system for producing and using type. Fournier related type size to the ‘pouce’ (a French version of the inch), and subdivided the ‘pouce’ to 72 ‘points’. This new system also became the adopted standard in the English-speaking world, and in 1742 Fournier published his Modèles de caractères de l’imprimerie, in which he further systematised the body sizes of printing types, and suggested names for the most commonly-used sizes. The first mention of types being organized into ‘families’ also originates with Fournier’s work. Subsequent technological discoveries perhaps allowed typographers to forget the great invention of optically-adjusted type sizes. Type produced by pantographic reproduction (scaling a master drawing to many different sizes), and the later technologies of photocomposition and digital type, allowed working from a single master design
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regardless of the size of the final application. Typefaces made between 1960s–1990s almost entirely ignored optical sizes because photocomposition allowed unprecedented possibilities of mathematical scaling. Opticallyadjusted sizes for type designs made a minor comeback in the early 1990s, most notably in ITC Bodoni, featuring size-specific designs similar to those used by the types originator, Giambattista Bodoni. These included Bodoni Six, designed for small captions, Bodoni Twelve for text setting, and Bodoni Seventy Two for display use. However, optical size is just one parameter which determines the appearance of a typeface. It seems that typefaces need to be linked by several other shared parameters in order to be seen as part of a coherent group or family. Another such parameter is the weight of the type. For about 400 years printers and publishers did well with a single weight of a typeface, using just the type size as the main means of semantic differentiation. Even complex documents, such as Samuel Johnson’s dictionary (A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755), use only a single weight of type set in different sizes to show the hierarchical differences between keywords, definitions and descriptions. The idea of varying the weight of a single typeface probably happened in the mid-19th century. Heavy typefaces did exist before that time, but they were generally seen on their own and not in relationship to the regular weight. The commercial pressures of the industrial revolution inspired the creation of as one of the first bold typefaces, but soon after its three-year copyright protection expired it was extensively imitated and pirated. Clarendon and its clones, however, although they were clearly designed to be used next to a Roman (regular weight, or text typeface), had not yet established a systematic relationship between the various weights (or widths) of a family-based type design.
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“Ever since the earliest use of movable metal type; certain typefaces have included versions cut for specific point sizes. Claude Garamond’s type from the 1530s (also known as the caractères de l’Université), included 15 versions ranging in size from 6 to 36 points.”
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NOT ONE BUT MANY From the early 20th century it became standard practice to include several weights of a typeface to complement the release of new type designs. The best example of this may be the work of Morris Fuller Benton, who complemented the many typefaces he designed for American Type Founders (ATF) with both condensed and heavy versions. Technology and aesthetics worked hand-in-hand for Benton, who used his fathers recently-invented pantographic engraving machine (1886), capable not only of scaling a single typeface design to a variety of sizes, but could also condense, extend, and slant the design. These fundamental geometric operations are the same basic transformations that most digital typographic systems use today. In the later part of the 20th century, the work of Adrian Frutiger uniquely shifted attention from the design of a single typeface to the design of a complete typeface system, seeing the design of a type family as a continuous space defined by two axes: width and weight. The Deberny & Peignot Foundry released Frutiger’s masterpiece, Univers,
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in 1957 in an unprecedented 21 variants. Frutiger’s systematic approach and innovative naming scheme eliminated confusion in type specification, and was perhaps even more interesting that the actual typeface design itself. He created a novel system of double digit numerically-referenced styles, where the initial number 5 refers to the basic (roman or text) weight, and the subsequent number refers to the width (5 be- ing standard or normal). Higher numbers signi- fied increasing weight or width, so while Univ- ers Regular was Univers 55, Univers Bold was referred to as Univers 75, and Univers Regular Condensed was Univers 57. The Univers system anticipated 9 weights and 9 widths (also incor- porating an oblique, or sans serif italic variant), although some combinations of these proved unworkable in practice, so there is no Univers 79, or Black Condensed. Linotype further expanded the Univers family in 1997 to 63 versions – for this the numbering system was extended to three digits to reflect the large number of variants in the family.
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Frutiger originally envisioned this system to be used with other typeface families, however his systematic numbering convention never gained wider acceptance with either the foundries or his contemporary type designers. The incorporation of two different styles of type- face into one family was probably first explored in 1932, by Jan van Krimpen in his Romulus project. Van Krimpen’s intention was to create a large family of types for book printing; these would comprise a roman, an italic, a script type, bold and condensed types, at least four weights of sans serif, Greek text type, and possibly more. This was deliberately more ambitious than the type family of Lucian Bernhard, who released his types (Bernhard Gothic, Kingsley ATF, 1930) two years earlier. The sans and serif forms of Romulus share the same construction principles, but the resulting letterforms of the two styles are quite different. Van Krimpen quotes the type historian John Dreyfus in his book On Designing and Devising Type 1957: ‘The purpose of the Romulus family was to provide the basic necessities for book printing and by means of a series of related designs to make possible consistent, flexible ... style.’ Interestingly, Van Krimpen attempted to separate the style of his roman type and to apply it to Greek script as well. Although Romulus Greek is a fallacy, as it misunderstands the translation of letterforms from Latin to Greek, the method which Van Krimpen suggested is successfully used in localising most of non-Latin type today. When type design is understood as a system, it can be seen to consist of many shared parameters amongst letterforms from even such different origins as Greek and Latin.
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PARAMETRIC DESIGN A radically new view to understanding type families was paradoxically not proposed by any designer but by a mathematician. In 1977, Donald Knuth conceived a programming language that he called Metafont, which defined the shapes of letterforms with powerful geometric equations. Rather than describing the outlines of glyphs (like the later PostScript and TrueType font formats), Metafont describes an imaginary ‘pen’ that creates the stroke paths for constructing letterforms. Because of this unique approach, one can change a single input parameter for a typeface, such as optical size, angle of slant, or size of serif, and produce a consistent change throughout the entire font. A single font file can thus be a complex type family with many different versions. Metafont can control over 70 different parameters, which theoretically can define the appearance of any typeface designed with it. Even despite the obvious advantages of the system, and Knuth’s close collaboration with the celebrated type designer Herman Zapf, Metafont never became widely used. Later technologies such as Apple’s GX and Adobe’s MultipleMaster font formats were similarly ill-fated.
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THE HAGUE SCHOOL Gerrit Noordzij, who taught writing and type design at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague for 30 years, outlined and developed his theory of writing in several books. His model presents the serif style as high-contrast type, as distinct from the sans serif style as low-contrast type, and arranges them in a coherent model of typographic possibilities. Therefore, instead of ideological discussions of ‘serif’ vs. ‘sans’, Noordzij focuses on the influence of tools while making marks on a surface. Noordzij describes three ways of producing typefaces: translation, expansion and rotation, each referring to different processes and the resulting stylistic differences between various groups of typefaces. Noordzij’s pragmatic theories were highly influential amongst a group of designers that studied at the Academy. One of them was Lucas de Groot, who designed Thesis, (1994-99) a typeface family with three constructional variants of the type (sans serif, serif, and mix), comprised of 8 weights and totalling 144 variants. This type ‘superfamily’ was later fur- ther expanded by the addition of monospaced and condensed versions. De Groot developed and applied his own interpolation theory to the design of Thesis, which makes non-linear rela- tionships between the weights of the type design. Thesis, first released in 1994, was the largest type family created at the time.
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Part of the contemporary program at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague is Type & Media, a postgraduate program focused on type design education. It is only natural that such a place should be at the forefront of of typographic experimentation, redefining what we understand by the terms ‘typeface’ and ‘type family’. Gustavo Ferreira, a recent graduate of Type & Media produced Elementar (2003-2006), a comprehensive system of pixel fonts generated by a series of Python scripts. Elementar draws its inspiration from Metafont and Univers rather than existing bitmap fonts. It is a parametric system responding to selected input criteria; a basic design for a simplified pixel typeface serves as a model, on which other parameters are applied. Because of the limitations of rendering glyphs on screen in small sizes, glyphs are expressed in terms of exact fractions or multiples of the model design. Such large typeface systems can become quite impractical to use, as the list of stylistic variations in the font menu gets larger and larger. In the case of Elementar, it is over 500 individual bitmap fonts, so an alternative solution has to be offered to the user to select the correct variant. Rather than presenting the full list of typeface possibilities
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this way, Elementar comes with its own online interface, whereby the user can choose the parameters, and get the right stylistic variant(s). Kalliculator was a Type & Media graduation project of Frederik Berlaen (2006). Instead of drawing a typeface, Berlaen made a tool that makes typefaces based on a predefined set of parameters. Similarly to Knuth’s tools from the 1970s, Kallic ulator simulates pens and their relationships to a drawn stroke. Berlaen’s project uses Noordzij’s theories as a base and the Kalliculator electronic pen ranges between pointed and broad nib styles. Users can input a line drawing, and the programme calculates the contrast around the skeleton, mixing the mathematical middle of a stroke and and a path made by an imaginary pen. The idea is that the trajectory of the hand is separate from the style of the pen, so users can experiment by applying various parameters to their sketched strokes. A single drawing of an ‘a’, can result in hundreds of versions, with each one being directly linked to others via its source drawing. In this way, Berlaen’s application challenges traditional views of type families, as a typeface generated from the same skeleton is related to its family variants in a uniform manner.
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CONCLUSION So what exactly defines a type family? An analogy with a real physical family is not often helpful because unlike the biological world, different generations of typefaces are usually not considered to be part of the same family. Similarly, at the level of individual glyphs, each style of the type family must be recognizably different in order to remain functional. Yet each style must adhere to common principles governing the consistency of the type family. It is clear that individual members of the family need to share one or more attributes, and typographic history offers many examples of this; optical size, weight, width, stylistic differences (sans, serif and semi-serif ), construction differences (formal and informal), are the most common parameters linking members of type families. We can also find less common relationships such as varying serif types, changing proportions of x-height, ascenders and descenders, or contextually appropriate possibilities of different versions. Work by designers like Berlaen and Ferreira build on centuries of typographic innovation and help to explore new territory for type design. They participate in a cumulative, ongoing and inspirational history of type development, requiring that we continue creating this work in progress.
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Standard Deviations: Types and Families in Contemporary Design When the Museum of Modern Art decided, at the beginning of this year, to expand its purview and include typefaces among the artifacts of modern design it collects, it was a moment of celebration not only among the type designers whose works were selected but among all of us in the design community who care about type. The notion that a museum of art, especially one as august as MoMA, rather than a museum of history or technology had stooped to recognize type design as a culturally significant activity was thrilling. However, the feeling of elation quickly gave way to puzzlement over the specific fonts that were chosen and the multiple rationales proffered for their inclusion. According to the criteria outlined in the January 24, 2011 MoMA press release, the chosen fonts fall into four groups: functional, technological, historical, and cultural/aesthetic. “We chose some of these typefaces because they are sublimely elegant responses to the issues of specific media,” it says. In other words, some fonts were selected because they were designed to accomplish a specific typographic function: OCR-A for optical character readers, Bell Centennial for telephone directories, Verdana for computer screens, and Retina for stock listings. The press release continues, “We have tried to form a comprehensive collection of the most PAUL SHAW
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elegant solutions to typography design in the midst of the digital revolution….” Thus, some fonts qualify for inclusion on technological grounds: New Alphabet, Oakland (one of the inaugural bitmapped fonts by Zuzana Licko), Beowolf (the random font by LettError) and again, OCR-A and Verdana. Other fonts were selected because they “visually reflect the time and place in which they were made.” Hence the inclusion of Template Gothic, Dead History, Keedy Sans, FF Blur, Mason, Meta and Walker — typefaces which exemplify the upheaval in the small world of type design (and the larger world of graphic design) in the 1990s. These are fonts that were notable for their aesthetic experimentation. Finally, the new MoMA collection includes a number of fonts that bear no visual signs that they are digital or even that they were designed in the last forty years. These fonts are ushered into the modernist temple on the grounds that they “most inventively distill the essence of historical examples to give it new, contemporary life”. This historical rationale embraces three groups of fonts: revivals of metal typefaces (ITC Galliard, HTF Didot, CC Big Caslon, Miller, Mercury, FF DIN and Interstate), revivals of past lettering (Mantinia and Gotham), and parodies (Dead History, Keedy Sans and Mason).
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“We have tried to form a comprehensive collection of the most elegant solutions to typography design in the midst of the digital revolution.”
ARTICLE TWO
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THE ROSTER OF TWENTY-THREE INDUCTEES* INTO MOMA’S FONT HALL OF FAME INCLUDES
· OCR-A AMERICAN TYPE FOUNDERS, 1966 NEW ALPHABET WIM CROUWEL, 1967 BELL CENTENNIAL MATTHEW CARTER, MERGENTHALER LINOTYPE, 1976 – 1978 ITC GALLIARD MATTHEW CARTER, INTERNATIONAL TYPEFACE CORPORATION, 1978 FF META ERIK SPIEKERMANN, FONTSHOP, 1984 – 1991 OAKLAND ZUZANA LICKO, EMIGRE, 1985 FF BEOWOLF ERIK VAN BLOKLAND AND JUST VAN ROSSUM, FONTSHOP, 1990 TEMPLATE GOTHIC BARRY DECK, EMIGRE, 1990 DEAD HISTORY P. SCOTT MAKELA AND ZUZANA LICKO, EMIGRE, 1990 KEEDY SANS JEFFERY KEEDY, EMIGRE, 1991 HTF DIDOT JONATHAN HOEFER, HOEFER TYPE FOUNDRY, 1991 FF BLUR NEVILLE BRODY, BROWN FOX · EDIÇÃO 1
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FONTSHOP, 1992 MASON JONATHAN BARNBROOK, EMIGRE, 1992 MANTINIA MATTHEW CARTER, CARTER & CONE TYPE, 1993 INTERSTATE TOBIAS FRERE-JONES, FONT BUREAU, 1993–1995 BIG CASLON MATTHEW CARTER, CARTER & CONE TYPE, 1994 FF DIN ALBERT-JAN POOL, FONTSHOP, 1995 WALKER MATTHEW CARTER, WALKER ART CENTER, 1995 VERDANA MATTHEW CARTER, MICROSOFT, 1996 MERCURY JONATHAN HOEFER AND TOBIAS FRERE- JONES, HOEFER & FRERE-JONES, 1996 MILLER MATTHEW CARTER, FONT BUREAU, 1997 RETINA JONATHAN HOEFER AND TOBIAS FRERE-JONES, HOEFER TYPE FOUNDRY, 1999 GOTHAM JONATHAN HOEFER AND TOBIAS FRERE-JONES, HOEFER TYPE FOUNDRY, 2000 BROWN FOX · EDIÇÃO 1
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All twenty-three of these typefaces are worthy designs, but not all deserve the singular honor of being the first fonts collected by MoMA. Using each of the museum’s four criteria, there are many other fonts that are not only equally worthy of inclusion but a number of which are more deserving. On the technological front, MoMA failed to include any fonts from the five companies that pioneered the digital revolution in type: Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell, URW, Bitstream, Adobe Systems and Apple. From a cultural standpoint, Remedy (the answer to too much Helvetica) and Thesis (the largest type family to date) are among the no-shows. And among historical revivals, Adobe Garamond, the font that did more than any other to make digital type palatable to the design community (especially book desigers), is missing Win action. At “MoMA Embraces Typography,” a panel discussion sponsored by AIGA NY at the Museum of Modern Art, Paola Antonelli, the museum’s Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design, answered questions about the new font acquisitions. One factor in deciding which were in and which were out had nothing to do with their design merits. Instead, it was the legal issues surrounding fonts once they become part of the museum’s permanent collection and are expected to remain accessible to curators and the public in the distant future. She said that wrangling over EULA’s (end-user license agreements) scuttled the inclusion of Chicago and other city fonts from the first Macintoshes. Jonathan Hoefler, one of the panelists, said that the legal negotiations Hoefler & Frere-Jones went through were complicated but resolvable. On the other hand, panelist Matthew Carter, said that they were not particularly onerous. No one provided details, other than to indicate that the sticking point centered on the view that fonts today are not physical objects or images but code.
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When asked about oversights that did not involve legal issues (especially the glaring omission of any fonts from Adobe), Antonelli sheepishly said, “Think of us as ignoramuses.” Although her candor is to be applauded, the statement is damning. It implies that the museum did not do its homework, despite having empaneled a group of experts (among them Steve Heller, Rick Poynor, Emily King, Michael Bierut, Khoi Vinh, Peter Girardi, Tarek Atressi and Matthew Carter) in 2006 to advise the Department of Architecture and Design on its future design acquisitions, fonts included. Antonelli said that the current font selections were an outgrowth of the discussions among those experts, though she did not say – other than herself – who was involved in the final decisions.
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The twenty-three fonts were not the first to be acquired by MoMA, according to Antonelli. Instead that honor goes to the Helvetica, specifically the metal fount originally loaned by Lars Müller for “50 Years of Helvetica,” the small exhibition the museum mounted in the wake of Gary Hustwit’s film. Antonelli also stressed that the museum would be adding more fonts to the collection in the future, possibly as early as 2012. This first group will be joined by others and any mistakes made this time may be rectified. “Standard Deviations: Types and Families in Contemporary Design”, the exhibition designed to showcase the new font acquisitions, was curated by Antonelli and Kate Carmody, Curatorial Assistant. The installation was overseen by Julia Hoffmann, MoMA’s Creative Director for
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Graphics and Advertising, and others in the museum’s design department. An exhibition on type for a general audience is a difficult assignment, especially one devoted to digital type. Type is esoteric and, unlike type in the past, digital type is ephemeral. Yet, type is both universal and ubiquitous. And, as a result, more and more people are familiar with fonts – witness the unexpected popularity of “Helvetica: the Movie.” Antonelli recognized the problem and chose to solve it by lumping typefaces with other objects already in MoMA’s collection on the grounds that they shared the concept of “families.” This was a fatal decision. The first problem is that Antonelli does not fully understand the concept of family as applied to type and, although the exhibition includes a glossary, “family” is not among the words defined (nor are italic, weight or width). “Some of the clearest examples of family in design are digital typefaces,” the introductory panel exclaims, “which each comprise several dozen related sizes, styles, variations, and behaviors.” This is an inaccurate description. And no examples, either verbal or visual, are provided to clarify the concept, especially for the average museumgoer. The type family has changed over time and a simple chart outlining its evolution – from the pairing of harmonized roman and italic types by Simon de Colines in 1528 to the addition of bold romans in 1830s England to the full blown concept of a type family by American Type Founders with the extension of Cheltenham (from one typeface in 1904 to twenty-one in 1914) to the eighteen-member pre-programmed Univers family of 1957 to the standardization of families by International Typeface Corporation in the 1970s to the widespread acceptance of the superfamily (in which serifs, sans serifs and other styles are mated) in the 1980s and 1990s – would have been immensely helpful.
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Having established family as one of the governing themes for the exhibition, Antonelli failed to follow through in the typeface samples. No italics are shown (other than the pairing of an HTF Didot italic k with its roman counterpart), which is a shame given the radical aspect of ITC Galliard Italic. A number of fonts are displayed in their heavier weights (FF DIN Medium and FF Meta Medium; Keedy Sans Bold, Template Gothic Bold, FF Blur Bold, Mason Serif Bold, Gotham Bold; and Interstate Black), but without their regular or roman version for comparison. More importantly, the increasingly complicated notion of family that has sprung up during the digital era is not addressed, though it could have been. Even with the absence of Lucida, ITC Stone, Rotis and Thesis – four of the pioneering superfamilies – there are fonts in the exhibition that exemplify this slippery topic. For instance, only the Bold Listing of Bell Centennial, the least representative member of this unusually named family is shown. There is no Address, Sub-Caption or Name & Number. Similarly, Mason Serif is present, but Mason Sans is not. And Oakland is presented without its siblings Emperor and Emigre. To be fair, the artifacts that accompany the font specimens do, in some cases, show other members of the type family. But are general museumgoers going to do anymore than glance at them?
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The installation is confusing. The furniture, the toys and the industrial items are not integrated with the type but isolated.
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Antonelli’s idea of showcasing fonts alongside furniture, toy robots, early Macintosh computers and other objects is a strange one. She sees “serial manufacturing and customization” as their common ground, but exactly what is meant by this is unclear and the exhibition itself is no help. The installation is confusing. The furniture, the toys and the industrial items are not integrated with the type but isolated. A mishmash of chairs, dressers and lamps is planted on a platform in the middle of the gallery with two additional lamps hanging above. The three walls to the left, behind and to the right of the pile are covered in type specimens (truncated character sets and apposite quotations set in each font) with printed samples of each font propped up on a narrow shelf
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and, sometimes, accompanied by a small screen playing videos illuminating technical aspects of the fonts or interviews with their designers. The fourth wall, contains a glass vitrine full of old Macintoshes, toy robots, messenger bags and other industrial products; to its right the original series of sketches that led to Milton Glaser’s iconic I [heart] NY design; and, further right, the title and introductory statement about the exhibition. The title and subtitle are printed on four narrow panels, perched sideways on a narrow shelf. To a museumgoer entering the Architecture and Design Gallery from the escalator bank – the most common direction – the title of the show is invisible. Instead, the viewer is confronted by the pile of furniture and the three walls of type specimens. There is a sense that one is looking at two exhibitions, a not unreasonable expectation given the habitually cluttered nature of that section of the museum. Only when – and if – the museumgoer turns around is the title and introductory panel seen. Even then it is unclear whether it is referring to the I [heart] NY designs, the items in the vitrine, the island of furniture, the typefaces on the other three walls, or to the whole shebang. One wonders if Antonelli’s inclusion of the furniture and other design objects was done to disguise her lack of knowledge about typefaces. She has included a glossary of type terms to help the viewer understand the esoteric world of type design, but the list is woefully inadequate and several terms are severely bungled. Descender is defined as, “The part of a letter that reaches down below the baseline of the font, in g, p, and q, for example.” This definition is slack. It not only leaves out j and y but it could include the tail of
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Q which descends but is not considered to be a descender. Furthermore, ascender, descender’s more significant counterpart, is not included. Other terms that are deficient include cathode ray tube, font, joining stroke, ligature, and titling face. Definitions of point size, serif, typeface and x-height are flat-out wrong. Point size is not the “size of a font, based on its x-height” but, in metal type, of the metal body bearing the character. This height was larger than the distance from the bottom of a descender to the top of an ascender. In digital type the measurement is similar, except that now there is no physical object, just a bounding box. Typefaces with the same nominal point size can have wildly divergent visual sizes. This concept should have been illustrated in the glossary. (Furthermore, it is only with Postscript that 72 points equal exactly one inch. In the Didot system, 72 points equals 1.186 inches and in the Anglo--American system – the one that dominated in this country until the advent of the Macintosh computer – it equals .9936 inches.) “A short line that extends from the top or bottom of a stroke in a letter,” the first part of the definition of serif, is merely incomplete. But the second part – “It is a symbolic leftover from handwriting.” – is laughable. A serif is a tiny stroke (not necessarily a line) that terminates a principal stroke of a character. Serifs are not confined to letters and they may be found on horizontal and curved strokes as well as on vertical ones. They derive from formal lettering, not handwriting; and, although their functional value has been a matter of debate, they are certainly not symbolic holdovers.
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Typeface: “A set of letters in different sizes and styles, united in form and look, that are designed to be used together. Also called a type family or face.” Originally, typeface referred literally to the design of the character on the face of a piece of type metal. From there the term has come to mean the design of a group of related characters (not only letters) “united in form and look” but not comprising “different sizes and styles.” A typeface is not the same as a type family. The latter is a set of related typefaces, most often various weights and widths of a roman and its companion italic. Increasingly, the definition of family has been stretched to include serif, sans serif and mixed serif variants. Getting this term wrong undermines the whole notion that Standard Deviations is about types and families. Character is defined as, “An individual letter, also called a glyph or letterform.” This collapses the critical distinction between a letter (or letterform), a character and a glyph. A character can be a letter, but it can also be a figure (numeral), a punctuation mark or a symbol. Glyphs, in typography, are graphical units and as such they encompass and go beyond characters to include writing marks in nonLatin languages. “The height of the lowercase x in a typeface, upon which the heights of all other characters are based,” is the definition of x-height. This is overly literal and it puts the cart before the horse. The x-height (the z-height in older American
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type books) describes the height of the body of a lowercase letter and is only meaningful as a guide to the proportion of the body to the ascender height first, the capital height second and the descender depth third. The height of the x (or the z) is merely a convenience and not what the type designer is really concerned about. These definitions are crucial to the recent development of digital type and are precisely the sort of thing that Standard Deviations should have focused on. It is telling that the image used to advertise Standard Deviations on MoMA’s website is “You Can’t Lay Down Your Memory Chest of Drawers by Tejo Remy (Droog Design, 1991), a set of mismatched drawers precariously assembled together with a giant leather strap. This is a fantastic and fascinating design, but it is not a font. This image symbolizes the confused nature of the show and seems to be symptomatic of Antonelli’s and MoMA’s unwillingness to confront type on its own terms. Instead of displaying type in a direct and mature manner that, at the risk of being labeled boring or didactic, acknowledges the intelligence of the museumgoer, the museum has opted for sleight-of-hand tricks to entertain and distract him/her from the real subject of the exhibition. A prime opportunity to educate the general public about a niche area of design has been squandered.
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ARTICLE TWO
*I HAVE ADDED THE FOUNDRIES WHO WISSUED THE FACES OR THE CLIENTS WHO COMMISSIONED THEM TO THE LIST PROVIDED BY MOMA. THE NAMES ARE THOSE IN EXISTENCE AT THE TIME THE RELEVANT TYPEFACE WAS RELEASED RATHER THAN ITS CURRENT ONE. FOR INSTANCE, THE HOEFLER TYPE FOUNDRY DID NOT BECOME HOEFLER & FRERE-JONES UNTIL 2004. I ALSO ADDED ZUZANA LICKO’S NAME TO DEAD HISTORY SINCE SHE IS USUALLY CREDITED AS A CO-CREATOR, THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR TURNING P. SCOTT MAKELA’S DESIGN INTO A WORKABLE FONT. SOME OF THE DATES GIVEN BY MOMA ARE QUESTIONABLE, MOST NOTABLY THAT OF MERCURY WHICH THE HOEFLER & FRERE-JONES WEBSITE DESCRIBES AS “THE PRODUCT OF NINE YEARS’ RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT.”
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INTERVIEW
Interview: Karel Martens – Graphic Designer
Karel Martens (born 1939) finished as a student at the Arnhem School of Art in 1961. Since then he has worked as a freelance graphic designer, specializing in typography. Alongside this, he has always made free (non-commissioned) graphic and three-dimensional work. As well as designing books and other printed items, he has designed stamps and telephone cards. He has also designed signs and typographic façades for a number of buildings. Karel Martens has taught graphic design since 1977. His first appointment was at the Arnhem School of Art (until 1994). He was then attached to the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (1994-99). From 1997 he has been a visiting lecturer in the graphic design department at the School of Art, Yale University. In the same year, together with Wigger Bierma, he started the Typography Workshop for postgraduate education within the ArtEZ, Arnhem.
PETER BILAK In his work, Karel Martens embraces
both freedom and order. He finds inspiration in the limitations of the profession and turns obstacles into challenges. OASE, a Dutch architectural journal, is an illustration of how designer can maneuver in the narrow field of graphic design production. OASE balances between book and a magazine and each new issue reinvents its forms to surprise its readers. Karel Martens gave OASE a clear direction and convincingly makes a magazine that is both modest and luxurious, making one believe that a low-budget publication is in fact a precious object to be collected. A grid became a fascinating element for Karel Martens. The most basic element in graphic design is given an active role that reflects the tone of the magazine. Karel is the founder of Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem.
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INTERVIEW
Q1
Q4
When did you start working on OASE magazine?
What is the size of the OASE magazine? It is related to the maximum size of the sheet?
The first issue that I did was in 1990. Before it was a magazine of a different format, A4 size.
Q2 Did you suggested a new size?
Yes, 24×17 cm it is the most economical size for the 50×70cm presses in the Netherlands. It is very economical, however, you cannot bleed on all sides. I have to adjust the design to this as well, so we move all the images up on the sheet.
Q5 When you started working on OASE did you design a fixed grid for the future issues?
Yes. The magazine has quite a theoretical approach, so used this book format. Before was just loose papers, where students would hand their type-written essays. It looked very nice, I liked it, but it was a bit problematic to continue this way, so I decided to change it.
For me the grid is an instrument that allows me to work with books. Very often it is a flexible grid so I am not too constrained, I still have to take decisions about placing text and images.
Q3 And the change was using a book format rather then using a conventional magazine format?
Q6
There was a lot of text, and not so many images. It was easier to read in a new format.
Has the grid changed since the first issue? How was the grid evolving as the magazine was growing up? Yes, The 6×2 mm grid changed. When the production of OASE changed, and now we are doing it fully in-house, the grid changed. Now it is
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INTERVIEW
Q8
made completely on the Macintosh and this offers much more opportunities to play with columns, type and the margins.
Did you add more pages when OASE became bilingual?
Q7 I spent some time looking at OASE trying to follow the internal structure of the magazine. I had an impression that the grid is changing with every issue, as well as paper and typefaces. But those changes are so subtle that you don’t see them from issue to issue, you need to see a series them to compare the first one and the latest one and only then can one see the changes.
No, and that was the problem. The editor wanted to have the English translation, and asked me to put it in the back of the magazine. However, for me it was a nice opportunity to combine both languages, but they did not offer me more pages. The type was getting smaller and smaller.
Q9 So there is twice as much text now, but the same amount of pages? [laughs] ...exactly...
Q10
That’s true. As basic typefaces I am trying to stick with Monotype Grotesque and Janson, but there are exceptions. The grid is also changing when the format is changing [an issue on poetry and architecture has a different size]. The grid, and the division of the grid, depends on the complexity of the issue. The last two issues are bilingual, so I had to adapt the grid to accommodate more text. We are now doing an issue of OASE [issue 49] and we made the Dutch and the English text equal. This requires a change in grid too.
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It seems that you turn all the technical constrains and limitations to an advantage, and there is no visible aesthetic compromise in OASE, all the issues work well with all these limitations. Limitations are an important thing in design in general because they offer solutions.
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INTERVIEW
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INTERVIEW
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INTERVIEW
Q11 You seem to almost enjoy those limitations. It’s not that I would ask for them, but I am always trying to find my space when working on a project. There are not so many limitations as in the past, I feel more flexible, and it is easier. OASE is a very low-budget publication, and I know that if I change the paper, I will probable be able to add one more colour on the cover, or if I reduce the size I could add more pages. For me, from the beginning, it was important to realise that it is always the same audience that reads OASE, and they don’t really want to have always the same magazine with just a different cover. It is the same as if I would have invited a guest to my house and prepare a wonderful meal. They enjoy it, but if they come next time, I cannot prepare the same meal again. It is more respectful to the public to always prepare something unique. They look forward for the next issue.
Q12 How did OASE change when you worked on it with your students? Before it was much more of your individual job, now, the latest issue you designed together with Stuart Bailey and Patrick Coppens. How did it affect the process? There is not much difference. Of course now the work is much more of a dialogue, Stuart and
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Patrick have different visions, and this is their contribution to the magazine, but essentially there is not a big change. We are trying to make it a game. We are not doing these kind of commissions for money. As I mentioned it is very low-budget magazine. So my honorarium has to come from a nice result. For me it is important to be involved with architecture, a field that is very close to design, I enjoy reading all the articles. It is a free time job. I let the content decide how the magazine is going to look.
Q13 You’ve been working on OASE for 8 years. Do you see a direction in which the magazine is going, or is it hard to predict because it is so much driven by its content? I don’t know. I approach it differently every time. You can see it on the OASE logos. There isn’t one. Each issue is treated individually. I am completely free in designing the magazine, it is an issue of trust between the publisher and us.
Q14 How much are you involved in making the editorial decisions? Not so much, I am not as intellectual as the other people involved in the magazine...
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INTERVIEW
Q15
Q17
... but you were very influential for the magazine, you always propose the covers, you suggested the bilingual solutions, you discuss the articles...
Maybe it is the diversity of forms, this plurality that allows you to decide each time individually... ... yeah, perhaps... perhaps it is the flexibility of a small country. In big countries I see more constrains than here in the Netherlands. I don’t know.
... of course, I read all the articles and talk about them, I choose the visuals, but I am not active in deciding about the future of OASE, this is not my worry.
Q18 OK, the last thing I’d like to ask, is a thing that all the people that know you want to ask but they don’t dare, and that’s the origin of your famous chinese-indigo blue jacket. Where does it come from?
Q16 When I saw OASE for the first time I thought it looked very Dutch. When I’ve seen later issues this feeling was only reaffirmed. What do you think makes it look and feel so Dutch?
[laughs] That’s not so special... I bought it first 15 years ago, I like it for all the pockets it has, and it is so light. I now buy them in Paris, last time I bought 3 of them...
That’s funny, I would also like to know...
Interview, 1412 words, 1999 First published in OHNO magazine, No.1, 1999 BROWN FOX · EDIÇÃO 1
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ARTICLE THREE
What is Typography? “What do we mean by the term typography? Before starting any discussion it is useful to clarify the terminology and definition of the word. This is a first from the regular columns that Peter Bilak writes for online version of the Swedish magazine CAP & Design.”
PETER BILAK Before starting any discussion or argu-
ment it is useful to define the terminology and to make sure that the words which are used are generally understood. Typography is a craft has been practiced since the Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type. According to the latest Encyclopedia Britannica core definition of typography is that ‘typography is concerned with the determination of the appearance of the printed page’. Other dictionaries, such as Collins English Dictionary from 2004 define the typography as ‘the art, craft or process of composing type and printing from it’. Understood this way, no typography was made before mid-15 century, as it is strictly linked to the invention of the printing type. Understood this way, digitally created letters that appear on an electronic screen also escapes this definition.
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ARTICLE THREE
That is of course problem of definitions, which are not as flexible as the activities which they define. In the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, where I teach part time, most useful definition of typography comes from the long term teacher Gerrit Noordzij, saying that ‘typography is writing with prefabricated letters’. Unlike the dictionary definitions, this one is deliberately avoiding connecting typography to any specific medium, as they tend to change, yet the discipline continues evolving. Noordzij’s definition also implies a complete distinction from lettering, handwriting or graffiti, which are also concerned with creating letter-shapes, but don’t offer a repeatable system of setting these letters. Digital technologies stimulated unprecedented possibilities which blur even most open definitions of typography. If repetition of shapes was the central concept of typography, many designers are working in ways that challenge this concept. OpenType fonts can include random features, which can simulate unpredictable behavior of handwriting, or simply present seemingly incoherent library shapes. For the past year, I’ve been working with dancers from Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague on creating a tool which translates text
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into simple choreographies. User types a word in a typesetting-like application which plays back this word as an uninterrupted dance sequence where dancer’s body temporarily makes positions recognizable as letters.
Is this typography? Project like this, as many others using existing digital possibilities seems not much worried about it, but use typographic principles to create autonomous work which cross boundaries of various disciplines. It seems that typography itself matured into a new creative discipline in which majority of typographers work in a way which is guided by historical understanding of the word, yet there is room for experimentation which explores the boundaries of the profession. In other disciplines, such debate is in fact a sign of new self-consciousness. Novelist Milan Kundera argues that a contemporary novel is no longer defined as a fictional narrative in prose, but can include various forms of writing: poetry, shortstory, or interview. Kundera’s books include parts which are philosophical, political, comical, while still being firmly part of a novel. The ability to absorb these various forms is Kundera’s definition of novel. Similarly, larger understanding of typography, which is no longer defined by technology, but evolves with it, may open this discipline to new create endeavors.
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